maintenance

One question that I have received quite a few times was about the
maintenance of Wanderlust; it's may be a nice e-mail client, but little
seems to have happened in the last few years. It's reasonable concern.

Fortunately, it seems the situation has improved significantly. There's
more traffic on the mailing lists, both from old and new users. Various
improvements are circulating; the place to get the latest stuff is in David
Abrahams' git-repository: semi, flim, apel and wanderlust. The plan is to
gradually apply the changes to the upstream (CVS) repository.

bugs

Although I have been quite happy with Wanderlust, there was one bug #5534
that has bitten me a few times, causing occasional hangs when saving
(draft) messages with non-ascii characters. It seemed finally to be a bug
in emacs itself, which is triggered by something in Wanderlust. A fix will
probably be available for the next emacs version; until then, you can work
around this by using an external MIME-encoder. To do this, add the
following to your WL initialization code (thanks to various helpful people
on the WL mailing list):

This requires the mimencode-program, which is part of the
metamail-package. For the time being, this seems to be the best solution
when using Wanderlust with Emacs 23.

one more trick: reformatting

Let's finish with one more trick. Sometimes, incoming mail is formatted
quite badly; in particular, the new lines are too long for comfortable
reading. From the WL-mailing list, here's a trick to deal with that:

22 comments:

This usually works wonderfully, except that after opening something like two dozen messages (sometimes less, sometimes more), it suddenly stops working :-( It seems longlines suddenly ignores the line endings and fills the whole message as if it was only one line... I can't reliably reproduce the bug, and I don't know what causes it; it certainly nothing about the message itself, since sometimes the same messages are filled correctly, sometimes they aren't. The only thing that seems to be the same is that the bug occurs after many messages have been opened.

I like this method since it does the filling automatically and more reliably than the suggestion above -- unless of course the bug is triggered, in which case you have to restart wl.

I should add that the problem with using filladapt above is that it only treats blank lines as paragraph separators. So it will reformat signatures, the headers of forwarded messages, closing greetings (e.g., "Best, XX") and any mail in which paragraphs are not separated by blank lines. Longlines-mode deals with these properly. Except for the bug.

So, that's only me :-(...With non-ASCII characters like é,è,à,ä, etc, I get a "byte-code: Attempt to change byte length of a string" message in the mini-buffer and no sending. When I replace the non-ASCII characters by ASCII characters (é by e, etc...), the email is being sent without any problem... Strange...

I use the wl-beta, like you are.

About mu, I know that, I just would like to point out an other solution I found while crowling the www :-).

To anyone looking for a Emacs mail client: VM (View Mail) also went through a quiet period of very little development, but now a new maintainer has picked things up. Version 8.1.0 was recently released. It has, among other things, support for Emacs 23 and finally full support for IMAP folders. See

McKnight, for the extra mime info, what I do is use a different face for these lines, one that is visible but only just. The face to customise is mime-button-face.

My own bug-bear with wanderlust, which I've been using pretty much happily for quite a while now, is that the message composition window breaks so many emacs' modes of operation... e.g. C-l does its own version of recentering and colouring does not use the standard font-lock mode (and this applies to the summary window as well).

The problem with VM is the lack of support for maildir (I believe that's still true).

Thank you for the good tutorial. I just want some more informations: I am kind of facing a bug in threaded message display, the vertical bar doesn't appear at all! When I tried to subscribe to the mailing list of wanderlust I had no response. Could you please help in fix or tell me how to join the wanderlust mailing list?PS: I am running last wanderlust version 2.15.6 (almost real) with emacs 23.2.5.

I sympathize with the poster who was annoyed with the composition window's non-font-lock-ness. Here is a 5 min hack around it, that also has the nice benefit of putting some space around your text and the quoted reply (and lets you press enter anywhere on the quote line):

So, now what? Since the host for their CVS repo and mailing lists shut down, I don't know where to find official information about WL. Everything seems to point at something dead or outdated. I started working with Gnus again a while back because of slow NNTP access to large groups in WL. Is it being maintained?

Has anything been done to speed up access to large NNTP groups?

What source code repositories are being used?The ones at https://github.com/wanderlust are still marked as"Unofficial." http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-zh/WanderLust#toc13 callsthose repos "semi-official"